Entities with substantial printing demands typically implement a high-speed production printer for volume printing (e.g., one hundred pages per minute or more). Production printers may include continuous-forms printers that print on a web of print media stored on a large roll. A production printer typically includes a localized print controller that controls the overall operation of the printing system, and a print engine that includes one or more printhead assemblies, where each assembly includes a printhead controller and a printhead (or array of printheads).
Recently, the establishment of infrastructures called cloud services in which services are provided by a server system connected to the Internet, has been in progress. Print services for printing over the Internet have also been provided. The services offer functions of generating and distributing print data with a server on the Internet at the request of a print device. Currently, systems that provide such print services by using the aforementioned Cloud are being developed.
Cloud systems typically implement a workflow management system to manage the production of large scale print and copy jobs. Functions of a workflow management system include meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and identifying potential problems that may occur during the processing of jobs. One problem that conventional workflow management systems are able to identify, but often cannot remedy, is a significant increase in the volume of work that is to be performed by the print services. For instance, a print service may result from an increase in business, which may result in the overwhelming of compute resources.
Once the compute resources become overwhelmed, throughput for all jobs may be significantly slowed, leading to missed SLAs. One solution is to acquire more compute resources. However, the additional resources may also eventually become inadequate, or the increase in volume may only be a short term occurrence, thus not worthy of a long term investment.
Accordingly, an improved workflow management mechanism is desired.